


Thirty Minutes More

by Daijoubu



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alternate Scene, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Missing Scene, Panic Attacks, don't worry it's not a major focus, or the author's best description of it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-24 17:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16644278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daijoubu/pseuds/Daijoubu
Summary: "Tell me," Eddie asks as Venom encompasses his body as they stare towards the Life Foundation, "What really made you wanna stay here?"The answer is instantaneous. "You. It was you, Eddie."-What were the events that changed Venom’s mind? Or: what if we saw thirty minutes more from the movie.





	Thirty Minutes More

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in literal years, and haven't touched creating fanfic outside of half-assed drafts even longer. And yet, the Symbrock is strong, strong enough to convince me to write again. I may need to edit this when i go and rewatch the movie (third time, it's so good), but I'm proud of myself for this.  
> Enjoy!

The sun’s started to rise by the time they’ve escaped the goons’ radar, black skies turning to pinks and purples when they suddenly turn, still running, into one of the alleys that Eddie’s mind registers as the southside of San Francisco. It’s there that Eddie and his “passenger” come to a sudden stop, their lungs heaving and heart racing as they quickly look around to take note of the open-ended alleyway, the chain-link fence some 20 yards down splitting the residential (where they stood) from the business back entrances, and the fire escape stretching all the way up towards the roof. Good.

**“Don’t sense those assholes anymore,”** Eddie’s throat rumbles. **“Safe now.”** The black sinew of the alien—of Venom—ripples against his skin before shrinking, absorbing and disappearing into Eddie’s body as control of motor functions is suddenly thrust back to him and, _oh god_ , he thinks as he nearly trips over cobblestone and his own two feet,

**“No need to thank me.”**

_Oh, god._

Eddie lets out a noise like _hyaaaaann_ as he stumbles and slams his back into the brick-and-mortar building behind him, not feeling the distant surprise of falling nor the muted not-pain between his shoulder blades as hysteria bubbles up soda-pop and prickly through his chest and throat. He swallows, hard, before trying to speak. “Oh well gee that’s fan-fucking-tastic that we – I – fuck, _we_? What even––you know what, whatever, I just fucking OUTRAN CARS!! Outran. Fucking. _Cars_.” He goes to rake fingers through his hair but whoops he doesn’t have hair nor fingers his body’s still fucking _ENCASED AND SMOTHERED IN TAR AND DARK_ ** _THINGS_** _—!_

**“Not a** ** _‘thing’_ ,"** is spit into Eddie’s mind, black still rippling against him and _fuck_ didn’t it just disappear!? **“Venom is** **_who_** **we are,”** Venom says, a twisting sensation like indignation in Eddie’s stomach as his skin prickles, crawling from his back to his front, and he realizes Venom is moving across his body, (always moving), claws dissolving into normal fingers as the alien coalesces as a vest against his chest and arms, hidden by his hoodie. **“We are one and the same, Eddie. We do not “smother” anything of you.”**

His now-human fingers and hands are shaking. “Yeah well,” Eddie feels dizzy, that fizzy feeling now turning to spikes in his stomach, stopping just below his diaphragm, fuck— “I-I for one do-don’t quite agree so _wouldyoupleasegETOFFME_ _–_ ”—and he’s trying to rip and tear it off off _OFF_ _—_ _!_

 The black whiplashes back into his skin lightening-fast and settles like a rock in his gut, tight and hard and unmoving, confusion and hurt rumbling somewhere in Eddie’s head, and _fuck_ okay he is NOT confused—as he claws at his chest— _okay_ he knows exactly going on he’s being hunted down—the clawing isn’t working—and he managed to run away from cars—he starts pulling at his hair instead—and slashed at vans—his chest is feeling tight but he grabs his hair harder and the pinpricks of pain help but—and fucking hell he _ate another person, jesus!_

He faintly hears–something, he doesn't know what, but it’s rumbly and distant, like the cobblestone at his feet (when did he look down), and the rumbles make him think of cars—

  ** _“Eddie?”_**

—oh god, cars, are they back?, did they find him, he needs to leave he needs to go but his limbs feel like lead—

 " ** _Eddie?!”_ **

—and his throat feels tight and why does he feel lightheaded—

**_“EDDIE!”_ **

Eddie strangles out a gasp as he snaps back to the present, eyes wide, the sensation of sight and sound of the alleyway almost overwhelming him despite the quiet dawn. Panic nearly grips him again when he thinks his diaphragm is paralyzed, but–oh. No, not paralyzed; it’s held still by his body-buddy. Before survival instinct and more panic kicks in, however, he feels it– _Venom_ –slowly let go, and he can practically "see", in his mind’s eye, all of a sudden how uneasy and skittish Venom is but still trying to help. (Reminds him of awkward childhood hugs with his aunt, all hovering and doesn't know how to deal with a thing. So awkward, hehe. Fuck.)

**_“_ Breathe _, moron; you creatures need oxygen to survive on this stupid planet.”_ ** Eddie tries to do the thing, the _breathe out, breathe in, breathe out_ , but his heart’s just not into it, especially since it hasn’t calmed down since they stopped running; adrenaline, it’s a bitch. **_“Okay, that’s it. Let us,”_** he hears (never realized it tickles when Venom talks, at the base of his skull, never noticed), and Venom is oozing through him, Eddie _feels_ it as Venom hitches his heart and eases it back into normal heart rate range while tensing and easing Eddie’s lungs into breathing slow, before Eddie’s able to join in. In; hold; out.

 In; hold; out.

_In...hold...out…._

Eddie slumps against the building wall, strength leaving him on the last exhale and adrenaline spent. _Fuck_ , he thinks, legs jelly, _I haven’t had one of those in a while._

**“What was that,”** Venom demands as he materializes near-instant off Eddie’s shoulder (like he did--fuck, mere HOURS ago, what the hell), startling enough to jostle Eddie a bit; his “eyes” squinting and..brows? are dug close on his ever-grinning face; he’s confused–no, _perplexed_ Eddie realizes as Venom says, **“We escaped. Killed. Survived. And yet your body went haywire just now.”** Venom gets closer to Eddie’s face, head doing some sort of small, jerky movements that Eddie has seen many times with others—with _humans_ —to know that the alien’s doing a worried once-over, and if Venom had hands, he thinks stupidly, they’d be hovering over him. Eddie feels a twinge of something below his ribcage, but he doesn’t have the energy to look into it. **“Explain.”**

  _Hehehe, say please,_ Eddie giggles as he sing-songs in his head, giddy-tired. God, he’s on a hair trigger. Venom just gives him a proverbial question mark and another, sharper pang that, ah, is Venom’s poorly concealed panic. Ow, that actually hurts a bit. “Okay, okay, easy; that was, um. God I can’t believe I’m explaining this to an actual fucking ALIEN—”, he gestures to the air, arms flailing and nearly missing Venom’s disembodied head before unceremoniously dropping back to his sides, momentum having him bump into the wall with another, gentler thump. He hopes this building’s not residential, and he’s not smacking against someone’s bedroom. He doesn’t need to add disturbing the peace on his list of ongoing personal offenses, too, along with being a bounty for a corporate entity, assault and battery, and several traffic offenses. Oh, yeah, and eating a guy.

 Fuck, right, explaining shit to a literal alien. Symbiote, rather, he thinks distantly.

 “H’okay,” he says, allowing himself to finally slide down the wall to sit on the dewy-wet cobblestone, and sure his ass is going to be soaked through but fuck it. Venom still stays hovering, unusually patient. “How to explain this…” Fuck but he’s tired; brain, why no work. “Well, humans would call that a panic, or anxiety, attack. It, um,” he exhales through his nose, hard, and lips pursed as he cards his hand through his hair, gaze looking anywhere other than the other’s eyes. “It can happen when the mind is stressed. Can happen from little things to big things.” Eddie snorts, shakes his head and taps his temple. “Big thing, right here for me. For any human honestly; jesus,” he laughs, throat feeling scratchy, tasting the hysteria in the back of his throat again, but luckily there’s no energy left in him to feed it. Now it’s just a sharp twang at the back of the tongue.

Eddie glances up after a moment of quiet, and Venom’s just watching him, silent, observing. Eddie lets the silence be a moment of reprieve to lean back, to close his eyes and blank out his mind for just a minute, and only a minute, he tells himself. But so much has happened over the course of one night, he can’t blank out, just sees flashes of sparks and flame, the smell of burning rubber and car paint, seeing those men’s faces as he–as _they_ had went to counter-strike, knocking out all of their stupid shocked faces in mere minutes. Eddie has to laugh at that under his breath, as messed up as it is—if he doesn’t laugh, he’ll cry, and he really doesn’t feel like having another kind of breakdown Two in one night? Probably not good.

**“Surviving should not give off fight-or-flight,”** Venom states, voice close enough to rumble-tickle Eddie’s ear and startling him to jerk and open his eyes. **“We know this.”** Venom is still staring, though now more off to the left, looking almost...contemplative. **“Felt it before.”**

“Yeah, well, not everyone–. Wait,” Eddie blinks, confused, “you’ve felt what before?”  He now tries to look Venom in the eye, though the other stays firmly looking away. He notices another twisting sensation, this time in his gut, and it feels like guilt.

**“Panic.”**  Eddie can feel the Symbiote start to move under his skin, a tidal wave of gooseflesh, almost, heading towards his neck. **“Fear.”** Eddie blinks in muted surprise as Venom curls around his neck like a black, gooey snake, closer but still looking away. **“Defeat.”** The phantom guilt he feels is eating away at him, and Eddie doesn’t like it. He reaches to pet Venom’s head, hesitates. Then Venom continues to talk, **“They all were like that.”**

And he starts petting Venom. The other stiffens as he asks, “The other people you bonded to?” He doesn’t know why he’s asking, maybe he’s just exhausted enough to not giving a shit about getting dragged into all this, for now.

**“Not bonded,”** Venom says after a pause, a hesitance, before settling onto Eddie’s shoulder, into the scritches, **“but yes.”**

“Right,” Eddie says, resting his head back, gaze distant as he stares through the fire exit ladders across from him, tone airy, as he continues his scratching, “because all those people at the lab were _‘willing participants’_ , right?” He can only imagine the horrors those poor people experienced; locked up, forced to absorb the blobs of oily specimens…

**“NO!”** Venom snaps and Eddie jerks his hand away, Venom turning to face him fully with bared fangs, and Eddie feels that tightness of emotion in his side again, lava-hot and burning as the other says, growling, **“I did not want it! I didn’t have a choice but to go to those humans, Eddie. Can’t exactly live well here,** **_asshole_** **.”** Then Venom shifts, something rippling against and under Eddie’s skin and up his spine to the base of his skull, and then—

_And then—_

Now Eddie sees something different in his head than what he was imagining, a different perspective of the lab; a memory. He’s confined in a space with barely room to shift, like he’s in a box, and he’s starving, going to die soon, and then the room opens and he can’t ‘breathe’, can’t survive, but something’s there that could help, jumps on and in the creature, the ‘human’, and tries to reach out for help but he’s just so hungry and he can’t stop eating and it continues again and again until he can’t tell what’s who and who’s what.

It was a terrible fate for both human and symbiote. Eddie has to bite back the bile suddenly in his throat, clutching and massaging at his alien-tight side.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie chokes as he blinks rapidly against the afterimages of the memories. Venom moves back a bit, the alien-tightness suddenly lax as Eddie both sees and feels the _blink, blink-blink_ of...astonishment? coming from Venom. He’s surprised too, honestly, at the genuineness. But. He swallows against the lump in his throat. “No creature should have to go through that.”

Venom just looks at him, unblinking and seemingly stoic, but Eddie knows better; he can’t even begin to comprehend the many things, the feelings, he feels going all around his body, Venom’s emotions going haywire it seemed. Surprise, shock, something soft that tickles his stomach that he doesn’t want to address.

“What?” Eddie asks, confused.

**“We,”** Venom starts after a moment, slow, as he eases himself back to laying across Eddie’s shoulders, **“I’ve never felt another be sorry for us. Never felt apologetic, either. Couldn’t, not with Others.”** That’s all he says, and Eddie just nods in somewhat understanding. At first he thinks ‘others’ was in reference to other humans, but the way it formed against their tongue sounded different. For once, though, he doesn’t ask.

“You never got any sympathy from anyone, huh? I know the feeling.” Eddie feels Venom’s attention shift to inward, to their mind, and Eddie shows him bits and pieces of himself. He remembers his earlier years of his life in New York, the mess of investigation with _The Globe_ , the other, more minor fuck-ups he did when he was much younger and high off life and potential. He thinks of his more recent fuck-ups, with the way he handled that Life Foundation interview that truly fucked his life over, with Anne and how selfish he’d been. His younger self should’ve gotten sympathy, he thinks; his recent past, not so much. Doesn’t regret a thing, though, save for Anne. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself for breaking her trust like that.

Venom pipes up to interrupt his brooding. **“Humans don’t like each other much, do they?”**

Eddie snorts. “Yeah, we can be madder than a pit of vipers at one another,”—he feels Venom raise a proverbial eyebrow at the phrase—“but then you find yourself someone or a group of someones and you _click_? You’d die for them.” He suddenly yawns, waves of exhaustion hitting him again as he lifts his head up to the sky, Venom copying him in both actions (yawns are even contagious to aliens, apparently, huh). It’s becoming light out for sure, the purple-yellows of sunrise already fading to gentle blue, and they hear the city start to stir; average Joe’s going on to live their average jobs, and the world keeps on turning.

**“You’re different than other humans, Eddie,”** Venom says with a lilt, leaning into the scratching that Eddie unknowingly continued, his sternum now alight with a buzzy-bubbling sensation. He feels a happy-something tug at the corner of his mouth; immediately tramps it down by covering with a yawn, though turns real halfway through.

“Yeah?” He glances to the other. “I sure hope so; I don’t wanna suddenly croak on ya,” he says, chuckling, hoping a bit of nihilism would lighten the mood; beginning to feel a little to _intimate_ for his tastes anyway. Fuck, his eyelids feel heavy.

**“I have said it before and I’ll say it again, idiot,”** Venom growls, the bubbles turning spikey with offense down his ribcage, again, ow, “ **You die? I die. And like hell I’m going to let that happen.”** He nips at Eddie fingers, but he doesn’t draw blood, so Eddie doesn’t react.

“Alright, Alright, I get it. It was just a figure of speech anyway.” Eddie looks down where he came from, sees a few pedestrians and some bikers and says, “Y’know, I think there’s a park nearby.” Venom looks at him and he shrugs. “I mean, we could probably chill there for a bit, take a nap.”

**“Nap?”**

“Yeah, to recharge the batteries.”

**“...Oh. You mean to rest,”** Venom deadpans once the metaphor is processed.

“Well ye- _whoah!_ ” Venom disappears back into Eddie’s body, no longer visible but the strength and the foreign tingling is still prickling under the skin. He still ends up patting around his chest and sides to try and find the other, though. “Besides, those fuckers wouldn’t think twice about making a scene in the middle of the day at a park. Or, well, I don’t think they would.” He really hopes what he’s saying will be true, though; any more action and he really would croak, Symbiote parasite or no.

**“Let’s go, then. Your energy levels are low.”** Venom has him stand up with a _hey!_ , strength most definitely not his own. **“And not a parasite. Dumbass.”**

Eddie doesn’t fight the smile this time as he laughs, walking out of the alleyway and squinting against the sunlight. “Uh-huh, sure.”

**“I will take you back to those hunters, don’t see that i will.”**

“Aww! Can I get that nap first, though?” Eddie sticks out his lower lip in a pout despite Venom not being able to see it, he’s sure the other would be able to feel it.

A pinch of strange emotion at his side again, then, with a tone sounding like an eyeroll, **“Fine.”**

**Author's Note:**

> This became so much bigger than anticipated. 0~0 Oh well, I enjoyed it!
> 
> There may be a second chapter containing another "potential what-if", though that may be a while. Real Life is such a bitch, yaknow?
> 
> Let me know what you all thought of this! Critique is welcome, but please be nice; I've barely enough confidence to post this, lol.


End file.
